[Cerowrt-devel] Cross-compiling to armhf [was: beaglebone green wireless boards...]

[Dave Taht]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 3:10 PM, Juliusz Chroboczek
<jch at pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr> wrote:
>> (does a working cross compiler exist for the aarch64 in the c2?)
>
>   apt-get install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu

d at osx: apt-get install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu

Not found.

...

One of the bigger mistakes I have made in the last 3 years was
adopting an macbook air as my main laptop - primarily because the
keyboard was tolerable and backlit, it was light on my back, and
everything worked, all the time.

Running a vm for any length of time drains the battery, and the mental
semantic confusion I get from switching keyboard and mouse interfaces
between linux vm and osx, not to mention the added overhead of porting
over the tools I use (notably aquamacs), has led to an enormous
decline in my day to day development activity and a corresponding rise
in using email and other management tools. For years I'd advocated to
others that if they are going to develop on linux, for any platform,
then they should eat, sleep, and breathe linux to do so, and I've hurt
my day to day productivity by trying, only counterbalanced by that I
can try for longer (like a 10 hr airline flight)

It turns out I use absolutely no native osx apps that don't run on
linux; although things like garageband had some initial appeal,
ardour4 proved better. So the only defenses I have for that laptop are
the lightness, keyboard, and battery life. It also serves as a
constant reminder of how limited other OSes are and the uphill battle
on what needs to happen for getting universal fixes on everything.

I have two other linux laptops, both broken. On one, the ethernet is
fried, on the other, the X11 gui environment got so messed up that I
can no longer log in - so both have ended up in the testbed for use as
fq_codel development targets rather than directly in front of me. I
have a chromebook, but my attempt to get a real linux on it ended in
disaster.

> Dave, I know you're a grumpy old man, but the Debian folks have done some
> remarkable work on cross-compilation, on multiarch, chroots and emulation.

Yes they have! It is quite amazing how arm got it's act together,
including and especially all the integration work linaro did. I have a
long story on all the work I did on arm architecture long before armhf
became popular, and the mess that that was, all the way back to 1998
and handhelds.org, the disaster that was the ep9302 FPU, the long slow
EABI changeover that was obsoleted almost overnight by the armhf work
the raspian folk did, and so on.

I do plan to try and reform on this upcoming trip - bringing an air,
and reinstalling that busted laptop from scratch - but even then the
trackpad never worked worth a darn. If I don't manage to reform, I'll
also have an odroid c2 and beaglebone with me that both support native
compilation.


> (I wonder why they still insist that we use the morass of complexity
> called Debian-installer.  It is so much easier to run deboostrap, generate
> a root filesystem, tweak the root filesystem until you're happy, and then
> copy it over to the target and be done with it.)
>
> -- Juliusz



-- 
Dave Täht
Let's go make home routers and wifi faster! With better software!
http://blog.cerowrt.org